Can you index your website w/o a database?

[H2O_aa]

If I want to have a search feature on my website. Does that mean I would have to have a database to contain all the pages in my website? But then what if I update my web pages very often, what happens to the web pages saved in the database? I am a pretty newbie so please don't laugh at my naive questions.

What I want is a search box for users to type in what they want to search for. For example for the word "agriculture", then a list of pages contain that word will be available. I understand how search engines work, they have robots that index webpages and save them into a database. Does that mean I also need a database to save all my pages, but then what about the indexing part?

[grandpa]

You can add a seach to your site without all the trouble of programming and databases. Google site search [google.com] for a few ideas. And don't forget G offers a seach capability for your site as well. So, to answer your question, yes.

[H2O_aa]

Well, I was thinking in the case of doing the seach function myself.

[moltar]

The database can be something as simple as a text file containing page references and page texts if you have only a few pages to search on.

If have even fewer pages and not that many searches (~ up to 20), you don't even need a database. You can just open each file and look for the query user has requested.